Heres a revoltingly typical example of todays performative qualming, from The Atlantics David Graham; Ill highlight the part where my laptop went frisbeeing over the fucking horizon:
That raises a range of potential objections. First, it unfairly forces a public figureTrump, in this caseto respond to a set of allegations that might or might not be entirely scurrilous; the reporters, by their own admission, do not know. Second, the appeal to transparency notwithstanding, this represents an abdication of the basic responsibility of journalism. The reporters job is not to simply dump as much information as possible into the public domain, though that can at times be useful too, as some of WikiLeaks revelations have shown. It is to gather information, sift through it, and determine what is true and what is not.
The appeal to transparency notwithstanding. Holy shit! If a reporters job is not learn what powerful people are talking about in secret, and then share it with everybody else, then I sincerely do not know what the fuck it is, or why we are supposed to believe it has any value whatsoever.
Here is a document that elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists have been circulating among themselves in secret for weeks is not merely a permissible news story. It needs no radical extremist reporting catechism to smile upon it. Publishing that document, if you have gotten your hands on it, is the most basic and essential act of reporting. The mandate to publish that document is not a matter of journalistic ethics, but the entire reason to have a free press. If the reason not to publish it is fealty to some code of ethics, then that code of ethics serves only to uphold reporters as a privileged class of information brokers. Of what value is that to the public?
But even on its own terms, this argument cant stand up. If a reporters job is to sift through information to parse out what can be verified before sharing it with the public, lets look at the verified truths in this story.
No one disputes that the dossier exists, or that it contains the claims in BuzzFeeds reporting, or that it has been making the rounds among many of the most powerful people in American government, though not all of them: